Social networking applications have become an essential element of the current networking life. Using a social networking application, a person can easily and instantly reach his or her contacts. The present technologies provide a variety of platforms for social networking applications. When public accounts are implemented in the social networking applications, the platforms of the social networking applications are transformed from pure instant messaging platforms to business trading platforms. A public account may be applied by a company or an individual user, and associated with accounts in other social networking tools. Through the public account, a user can share texts, photos, audios, and videos with a certain group of people, and interact with the certain group of people in full range. In general, a public account of a social networking application may include a service account of a public platform, and a subscription account of the public platform. The service account of a public platform may provide services to user such as banking, air traveling, train traveling, etc. The subscription account of the public platform may provide news and information to users such as daily news, health information, shopping information, etc. The most favorite functions of a public account include news publishing, brand marketing, media propagation, and user interaction, etc. The government departments, private companies, media companies, or individual users now open the public accounts to publish information and provide service; and more and more social networking users choose to “like” the public accounts such that they receive instant updates on the news/information published by the public accounts, and facilitate daily life by using the services provided.
A social networking application user may like a public account in, for example, two ways: (1) via scanning the two-dimensional code of the public account; and (2) via searching a keyword of the public account. Scanning the two-dimensional code of the public account may be limited by the popularity of the public account. Further, with the increasing numbers of public accounts, searching the keyword may return an increasingly long list of public accounts. A user cannot quickly recognize and select the public accounts he/she is interested in, and instead, has to go through the list of public accounts that match the keyword. Therefore, the procedure of searching and adding an interested public account is time-consuming.